Bond Between Generations, With Football on the Side

Justin Solis, a top defensive tackle prospect, with his grandmother Barbara Owens at their home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.Credit
Ann Johansson for The New York Times

The bond between grandmother and grandson began with vacations through the American countryside when he was 5. Later, she took him to Europe and beyond.

The grandson grew to be 6 feet tall and 260 pounds. At 14.

When the family needed to get him out of New York, the grandmother escorted him to a high school in California and inquired if he could join the football team.

Their lives have never been the same. Justin Solis, a junior defensive tackle at Westlake High, is now being recruited by the biggest college programs in the country.

The family’s job is to help him through it, educated and clean. Justin lives with his grandmother Barbara Owens, a self-styled hippie from the ’60s whose answering-machine message ends with “peace and love,” which may be misleading, especially to her grandson.

“I tend to be authoritarian,” she said. “My daughter tries to give him hints. She tells him: ‘Nana raised me. Think long and hard before you answer the question. She already knows the answer; she already knows the truth.’ ”

The bond has changed from when Owens first gathered up her young grandson for trips, just the two of them.

A friend told her the United States is so beautiful that they should see it all, so Owens drove north up the coast to Oregon, Washington, into Canada, then back through the interior. Tree houses. National parks. Historic sites. Scuba diving. Battlefields. The boy absorbed it, and so did Owens, who has a combination peace symbol and American flag tattooed over her heart.

“I love this country,” she said.

At the end of every vacation, the boy would go back to Queens.

Owens grew up in Flushing and went to City College. She became a nurse in a cardiac unit in the Bronx, but one day, she followed the call to California. Her daughter, Shannon Solis, graduated from Westlake High, only vaguely aware of the powerful football program, before returning to Queens, the ancestral home.

Justin came along and took to football out of infancy. His stepfather, Adam Martinez, would round up children in the projects of Astoria and take them to a grassy patch, and Justin would ask for roughhouse blocking and tackling, to see if he could take it. Martinez took him to a Jets game, and the boy became a Jets fan for life.

Photo

Westlake High School was unbeaten last season with Solis, who is 6 feet 2 inches and 295 pounds, starting at defensive tackle.Credit
Tony Panzica/Actionphotos.net

Shannon Solis escorted her son on long bus rides to meet his team, the Bayside Raiders of the Pop Warner League, a terrific program. She knew he was pretty good, but football seemed mostly an outlet for a growing boy. Then her shift changed, as a guard at the jail at Rikers Island, in the bay next to La Guardia Airport.

“Justin was used to me working 9 to 5,” Solis said. “Now I couldn’t keep an eye on him at night.”

The bond with his grandmother was strengthened by trips to Europe, Egypt, China and 40 states. Justin’s favorite memory is of digging for bullets in the hills overlooking the invasion beaches of Normandy; he proudly calls himself a history buff. After one summer vacation, the grandmother sent the boy home to Queens on a Monday.

“Shannon called me Thursday and said, ‘This isn’t working,’ ” Owens said. “She’d be working and she didn’t know where he was. She said, in New York, trouble was on every corner; you don’t have to look for it.

“I got him registered Friday. He flew out Monday and started school Wednesday.”

He acknowledged: “I was upset when it happened. I had no idea how big football was out here.”

Westlake was about to go into two-a-day drills. The varsity coach, Jim Benkert, received a call from the freshman coach, Norman Hanes, who said, “You need to come over here.”

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“He passed the eyeball test,” Benkert said with a chuckle the other day. “It was like Christmas.”

The freshman team went 10-0 with Justin. The varsity went 14-0 last year with Solis starting at tackle. Then it won its first eight games this season before losing to St. Bonaventure on a 2-point-conversion gamble in overtime. It has now won three more, including a 49-28 victory over Palos Verdes in the league quarterfinals Friday.

“I didn’t realize this world existed,” Shannon Solis said. She and Martinez have flown out for many of Justin’s games; she and her son exchange text messages and e-mails at all hours. And the family hears about the recent recruiting issues from Reggie Bush at Southern California and now Cam Newton at Auburn.

“I’m still trying to learn the rules because I’m a very ethical, moral person,” Owens said. “Justin needs to follow the rules so I don’t read in the newspaper that he shouldn’t have talked to somebody. I want everything clean and aboveboard.”

Photo

Justin Solis and his grandmother Barbara Owens during a vacation on Vancouver Island in British Columbia in 2001. They have traveled together since he was 5, exploring the United States, Europe, Egypt and China.Credit
Ann Johansson for The New York Times

For now, Benkert is taking all the calls and the mail. A recent stack was an inch thick, with envelopes from Nebraska, Louisiana State, Oregon, Alabama, U.C.L.A., North Carolina State and four from Arkansas.

“He’s a national recruit,” the coach said. A few weeks ago, Solis and Martinez flew out for a conference with Owens and Benkert, and Justin indicated he wanted to talk only to colleges out west. The coach told Owens to get a dedicated phone line for recruiting calls; she is wary of people who chat with her at games.

“It takes a village,” said Owens, who still works a full shift at Kaiser Permanente hospital in Woodland Hills.

When Justin has free time, he stays with Benkert and his wife, who feed him, and feed him. He’s up to 6-2 and 295 now, having just turned 16.

“His grandmother came over one day and said Justin should earn his keep by mowing my lawn,” Benkert said. “He didn’t know how to start the mower, and he didn’t know how to mow the lawn. His grandmother said there aren’t any lawns back home.

“That’s my next goal, to teach Justin how to mow a lawn.”

There are other lessons. Owens badgers Justin about doing his homework, and she follows up on daily postings by teachers on the school’s Web site. His grade point average, shaky at first, is up to around 2.5.

“I always tell him, you are one injury away from not having a football career,” Owens said. “You get an education, nobody can take it away from you.”

Justin has been invited to a prominent combine for 500 underclassmen in San Antonio in January. “I tell him, ‘You’re a big fish in a little pond, but once you start with stuff like that, you might be a little fish in a big pond,’ ” Owens said.

Benkert, who has been coaching for 22 years and has sent five players to the N.F.L., said in a low-key way that Justin was a prototypical college defensive lineman. It sounded as if he meant a professional prospect.

“The N.F.L., that’s got to be Justin’s dream,” the grandmother said. Her goal is to deliver her grandson to a college that will award him a scholarship and treat him honorably and help him educate himself.

She has delayed some of her dreams of roaming around the world, the ’60s free spirit still in there. But she and her grandson still have 10 states to visit. That is next summer’s trip, she said.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2010, on Page SP1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bond Between Generations, With Football On the Side. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe